​
​In my first visit to the Fantagraphics headquarters in Seattle 20-some years ago, I talked to legendary publisher and co-owner Kim Thompson, who sadly passed away in 2013.

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​This interview has been edited for clarity.

How did you first get involved with comics?
Eric Reynolds: I was a lifelong comics fan. I never thought I’d work in comics because it didn’t even seem like a legitimate career. I never even thought about it, but I always drew. Long story short, when I got into college, I was studying journalism, but through a strange twist of fate, I ended up interning in Fantagraphics and never leaving, basically.
 
How old were you when you started?
Eric: Here? I had just turned 22. It was my 22nd birthday, literally a couple of days before I started here.

​Did you publish your own comic books?
Eric: Yes. I did comics all growing up. I drew comics, I copied comics. When I was in college, I was the managing editor of the university paper. Like I said, I was studying journalism, but I was also the staff cartoonist, and did comics strips and editorial cartoons.
 
Where did you go to college?
Eric: University of California at Irvine. I even won a couple of awards from the journalism student organization. I was always doing comics, and continued after I started working here, doing many comics and collaborating with other cartoonists that I was friends with. I don't do comics as much anymore, but I still draw a lot, and try to keep my chops up.

Do you do anything with your drawings?
Eric: Not really. I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I stopped drawing comics. I’ve been so invested in Fantagraphics that I lost interest in doing my own comics. I still draw a lot. In fact, I draw more now than I have over the past 20 years. The thing I like the most about it is that I don’t do anything with it. It’s just for me and my sketchbook at night. It’s actually been really freeing to not worry about that stuff, because that’s what I do all day long with other Fantagraphics authors. I’m much better off not worrying about that stuff for myself and just doing it for the sake of it.
 
Not everything has to become a product.
Eric: Right. I think when I was in my 20s I didn’t realize that. Everything was like trying to accomplish something, trying to do something. I was always trying to do illustration work, chasing illustration work, chasing other little gigs here and there. Maybe that speaks to how little money there is, how hard it is to make a living in comics…but at a certain point, I realized I didn’t want to do that. I really realized it for myself, I felt like I was doing more good at Fantagraphics than trying to do my own thing.

​When we first met in 1997, the boom of the ’80s had already passed, but the cartoonists I interviewed seemed very ambitious, and there was a feeling that they could “make it” any minute. How do you feel about what has happened to the industry since then?
Eric: I have so many mixed feelings about it. All that stuff about, “Oh, we’re going to make it big.” In a lot of ways it did happen, but in a lot of ways it didn’t. Even someone like Dan [Clowes], who has probably become one of the most successful cartoonists of that generation, he doesn’t have mass, mainstream success. It’s just success. You’re still talking about relatively smaller numbers.
 
What comics have mainstream success now?
Eric: Something like The Walking Dead or Raina Telgemeier and some of the books for younger readers, like Bone. Dan Clowes is still- I mean, he's a literary success. Whether I'm talking about prose or comics, it's a relative success. The part that's really encouraging about it is that their comics have become a respected art form in literary circles, in a way that definitely was what we aspired to… to be a literary success type of author who gets published in The New Yorker or something like that. It's not Stephen King. It's not John Clancy. And that's fine.

​Even back in the 90s Dan Clowes was the most successful cartoonist I interviewed. Before I met him I talked to some people who were really struggling and even thinking about quitting comics. But when I got to Clowes he said he was glad not to be mainstream or overly successful.
Eric: I think that's what Dan (Clowes) would still tell you, that it’s a good thing. What he told you 20 years ago, I think he would still say it is true, even though he had some relative success compared to some of his peers. At that period in the '90s, you're right, that was a real crucial point in the development of that generation of cartoonists, and also just the development of the art form because those guys were really cutting edge at the time. That generation of comics makers were reinventing the wheel more than any generation had, at least since the underground cartoonists of the late 60s, and I think they paved the way more than really anybody has since then. The underground guys paved the way to just doing whatever you want, but they were still very transgressive. I feel that 80s generation took that freedom and ran with it in a more mature, sophisticated storytelling way.

​
​They took it beyond the art, or the visuals.
Eric: They were better fiction writers. They were better comics makers, too, just in terms of telling a sustained narrative. They really paved the way for everything that's happening now. I think that extends to people like Raina Telgemeier and the successful YA [young adults] books that you have now. I don't think you could have that today without stuff like Love and Rockets paving the way. And also the fact that you don't have to explain yourself anymore, you don't have to say, "No, I don't do Spider-Man. I don't do Garfield. I do the stuff for grownups who just enjoy literature and enjoy visual literature." By the same token, pop culture has become so dominant that it's also two steps forward, one step back, or even one step forward, two steps back.
 
Like the Comic-Con in San Diego is such a mainstream phenomenon. I only went that one time when we met. I remember Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly were across the aisle from Danzig [Verotik]. I can't imagine what the convention is like now.
Eric: I remember those days. It hasn't changed that much, to be honest. There's just fewer people like Fantagraphics. There used to be Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Last Gasp, Giant Robot, Sparkplug, Black Eye. Now, it's literally just Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly and Giant Robot. We're just surrounded by Danzigs now. [laughs]
 
How can you afford getting hotel rooms? Back then you suggested an affordable hotel. Last time I looked it up it was nuts.
Eric: They're crazy expensive. We bring fewer staff now than we used to back then. Did you go in '97?
 
Yes.
Eric: At that point we probably still had ten 10x10 booths. It was two rows, back-to-back. Now, we have two 10x10 booths. The space we have keeps shrinking. And every year, it's like, “So and so's not coming back”. I think we manage it because we've been going for so long, we're a little more established in the comic book world than a lot of alternative publishers. And we're on the West Coast already.

​So alternative comics got recognition but actually lost space in the mainstream?
Okay, for a specific example, in 2000, you had Jimmy Corrigan, and David Boring, and one of Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl books [Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District]. You had this critical mass of stuff coming out around 2000 that felt like the culmination of everything the '80s was building towards. You had mainstream successes amongst these fringe artists, guys like Clowes, Charles Burns, Ben Katchor, Chris Ware.
 
Did Ben Katchor get the super recognition the other guys did?
Eric: Katchor is still a fringe guy, but his work was coming out from Pantheon, a big publisher. You had all these big books coming out, and it really felt like, "This is it, we've done it. We've accomplished what we set out to do." Then in 2001, you had the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie come out. Just like that, overnight, the culture was embracing superheroes. Before it felt like superheroes were rightfully becoming marginalized so this other stuff could become successful. Then it just reverted right back to the way it was.

​And we’re stuck with all those unwatchable movies.
Eric: A movie like Ghost World, that came out in 2001, I don't think Ghost World would get made today.
 
It has a Brazilian cinematographer.
Eric: That's right. Affonso Beato.
 
For the longest time it was hard for me to be excited about new comics. Now there’s finally a new generation of cartoonists I like. Simon Hanselmann is probably my favorite.
Eric: Yes, Simon is great, I love his work, too. He’s a good writer. I think there’s plenty of really good work being done, and I think Simon’s definitely a great example. Today, I feel like everything positive comes with a caveat. I think there is really great work being done, but I do understand what you’re saying when you said you hadn’t been excited about comics for a long time. I can relate to that. I think the reality is probably somewhere in between, where your lack of enthusiasm is probably justified on some level, but I also think that if you were digging a little deeper, you could have found the good stuff. I certainly experienced that. I go through phases where I’m not super excited by some of what I see in contemporary comics, but sometimes I think that’s me being a little lazy too, and if I look hard enough I can find plenty of really good work.

​Is it part of your job to find and publish new people? Do you get submissions?
Eric: It’s less so the submissions than just staying engaged with the comics community. I feel like we have a prerogative to be proactive and look for good stuff. I say that because I know how easy it can be to just sit back. I’m working on books nonstop, so I always have a stack of proofreading and a stack of stuff to read. I always have more shit to read with Fantagraphics than I can handle at any one time. So it doesn’t always leave a lot of time to go out and actively search for new comics, but I have to do it. I go through phases where I struggle with it and I tell myself like, “Okay, I’ve got to engage.” I guess that’s the best way to put it.
 
There’s so much stuff on social media too, I can’t imagine how you curate it. There’s terrible art mixed together with great art, and a lot of noise in the middle.
Eric: Now you just have a lot more people who identify as cartoonists, and so you have a lot more good work and a lot more shitty work.
 
Democracy is never bad, right? It's good to have all this shitty work [laughs].
Eric: It's just part of the engine that keeps it all chugging along.
 
I feel like I end up going back to the same sources and probably missing out on a lot of good things.
Eric: If you know what you want, it’s so much easier to find it, and that’s great. I think I could put on my old man hat and complain about how it’s not as good as it was back then or whatever, but I think the thing that is different about what you just described and that I miss the most is the gatekeepers, the tastemakers that you could trust to steer you in the right direction, even if you didn’t know exactly what you wanted. If you knew that you had a particular taste for a certain kind of music, you could read Maximum Rocknroll and find something that’s in your ball park, even if you don’t like it or whatever. Stuff like Factsheet Five. Even the stores, good independent stores, of which there used to be a lot more.

​Eric: It really doesn't matter whether you're talking about comics or rock music. All of our culture is struggling with the same thing, but it's a hard thing to reconcile. It's like if you're in a band, on the one hand you can potentially find a huge audience overnight if the right circumstances happen, but on the other hand, where have all the rock critics gone that used to steer you towards the good shit? It's strange. I hate to sound like I'm getting into old man rants...

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​This is an old lady’s project, so it's fine. [I mean, really. It’s called “20 years LATER”]
Eric: Fair enough. I've said variations of this a lot over the years. Back in the '90s, you existed as much in opposition to something as you did in solidarity with something. People like the Hernandez brothers, they were operating in place of “We don't want to be this” much more than “We do want to be this." They were like, "Fuck Marvel and DC, and fuck mainstream pop culture. We're punk rock, and we're going to wear it on our sleeves, and that's that." But now you don't really have that. It's all one homogenized pop culture. I feel like now we live in a world where you don't draw those lines in the sand, where a punk band is seen in the same space as Lady Gaga.

​Eric: I think there's a phrase, “the good is always in opposition with the better”. I think that's true. Again, I lament the death of criticism and the lack of critical apparatus to write about culture, because I think that it does hinder some of that dynamic. “This is good, but it can be better, and it should be better. For this reason, this reason and this reason”. Now it’s like Friday Night Lights is the same as The Wire. They're both just “great TV shows”. They might be both very entertaining. But one is an entertaining melodrama and the other is a really sophisticated social commentary. They both have their virtues, but they're not the same thing.
 
I remember when Strangers in Paradise came out and everybody compared it to Love & Rockets. It's entertaining, but it's not the same.
Eric: Exactly. Strangers in Paradise is the Friday Night Lights. Again, I've never felt so many strange, conflictions in our culture as I do now, where, yes, you can make a strong argument that the art form of comics is healthier than ever. As an art form, it's more well respected than ever. It's read by a wider demographic of Americans than it has at literally at any point in American history. Yet, it's probably harder to be an artist these days than it's ever been. I think it's harder to make a living as an artist than it has ever been in my professional lifetime, which is going on over 25 years now.

​Do you think that is because of the cost of living in larger cities? Like Seattle is so expensive now.
Eric: Seattle is its own problem, its own beast, and, yes, that's a huge issue here.
 
In 1997 many cartoonists I interviewed lived in Manhattan, in Berkeley, in places they probably could not afford now.
Eric: That's exactly right. You think about where Clowes, Adrian Tomine and Richard Sala all lived, on College Street in Berkeley. None of them could move there now.
 
That’s why I chose Milwaukee. [laughs]
Eric: It's great as an artist that you can have the freedom to move to somewhere a little cheaper, but even that doesn't solve the problem. I think it's still harder for a cartoonist to make a living now than I've ever seen. Part of it is that there's no illustration work. Illustration work was always a really healthy way for a cartoonist to make side money. That career is almost nonexistent anymore. There's a myriad of factors at work, but your options to make money and utilize your craft as a cartoonist have never been so few. Nowadays, I'd say the most common career path is probably storyboarding and animation, but you need to live in a hub where that's an option, like Los Angeles.
 
Kaz is interesting to me, because he's writing for SpongeBob SquarePants, and then he does his stuff on the side.
Eric: Kaz is an example of someone who did navigate it pretty well, because he was of that generation where he probably expected to have an illustration career, a magazine career in terms of getting his strips published in places, in The Lampoon or The Village Voice, whatever. Instead, he had to completely reinvent himself. He moved to LA and got into animation. He was able to transcend doing storyboards, and actually become a writer, and have a little more creative control. But for every one of him, there's a Debbie Drechsler that's just dropped out of the face of comics altogether, because she probably never wanted to move to LA. Before you could have an illustration career anywhere.

​Debbie Drechsler’s comics always looked like a full-time job to me, because they’re so detailed, although I knew she had a career as an illustrator. I am surprised she and others like her were not “stolen” from comics by the fine arts. There’s Joe Coleman, but I guess he never really did comics, except for those short stories.
Eric: He did, he did a few, but not many. It's funny for someone who did so little comics, he's still associated with that world because his paintings do have this relationship to storytelling and representational cartooning.

​I'm really interested in what cartoonists do to survive, to be able to stay with comics.
Eric: There are plenty of examples of people who've done it, good cartoonists and bad cartoonists. It can be done. I think in some ways, maybe the ways that they do it aren't necessarily for everybody, whether it comes to making merchandise or generating clickbait and advertising revenue that way. That's not for everybody. I think nowadays your best bet as a cartoonist is sort of similar to what I was saying about the publisher, which was that you're more and more having to kind of rely directly on your patrons, on your customers. I think in the here and now, that can be a great thing. But over time, it worries me because it seems almost like you're going backwards to the point where it's like the Renaissance and a painter has to rely upon his patrons. I think for a number of cartoonists it's become kind of a lucrative means of making a living as an artist, but there's a lot of cartoonists out there, and I don't think they can all survive that way. I just think it's getting harder and harder. I don't know where it ends at this point. That’s like a real weird dirty secret in comics. Everybody talks like, "Oh, comics are so healthy. Fantagraphics is doing pretty well”. We're having a pretty healthy run, yes, which for us just means not being on the verge of financial ruin.
 
Like releasing the Peanuts books.
Eric: Peanuts certainly helped. But we're done with Peanuts now. We've published all of it, and we're still doing more Peanuts stuff, but the financial stability that Peanuts afforded us when we really needed it, that period has kind of passed. We always had those things, whether it was Peanuts or pornography or Disney comics or even some of our bestselling contemporary authors. There's always been those things that have helped us. We've had enough of that lately that we're having a pretty good run, but again, I worry about cartoonists, and I worry about the infrastructure for supporting this stuff in the long term, because it's really precarious.

​You also have the store and gallery here in Seattle.
Eric: It's a super tiny part of the business. For us, it's just a local place to have events. It's nice within the Seattle community for us to have that because this is our home and this is our community. It's great to have a presence in your own community. It's a minor part of the overall company, really small. It's a really small bookstore. It's great. I love it, but it's tiny. Drawn & Quarterly opened their store [Librairie Drawn & Quarterly] after ours. I think ours was a direct inspiration to them. They went bigger because there were few English language bookstores in Montreal. They went for a full-on neighborhood bookstore. Ours is a real niche alternative comics store.

​Are the audiences bigger? Like, is the audience for Love And Rockets, for example, bigger now than it was in the past?
Eric: No, I would say that Love And Rockets in its heyday when the market was completely different, and comics across the board were selling a lot more, Love And Rockets probably sold three times what it sells now. I think back in the ’80s, when it was at its peak, it was probably selling between 20,000 and 25,000 copies per issue. Now the books can still sell well over time. The difference then was that the comic book market was much healthier. These days Marvel and DC have comics that sell under 10,000 copies. Thirty years ago in the ’80s, Marvel would cancel a comic that sold under 50,000. Now, 50,000 is a bestseller for them. That whole market has just completely changed.
 
Like the Black Panther comic book. They got all these renowned writers to write for the series [Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxanne Gay, Yona Harvey], but they cancelled the comic just as the movie came out.
Eric: That makes perfect sense to me. Now you have a movie, you don’t need the comic. The movies do all the stupid things that the comics did, only better. Seven Spider-Man movies came out in the last 20 years. You don’t need any Spider-Man comics.
 
It’s like evil has won. [laughs]
Eric: Yes, I agree with that. Evil has won in so many ways. Like I said, Marvel is selling fewer comics than they ever have, but who are they selling to? The only fans that haven’t abandoned them yet. All the casual fans, they’ve all abandoned them. They’re down to their base. They’re like Donald Trump spouting racist epithets. They are catering to their base. That base doesn’t give a shit about Ta-Nehisi Coates. What’s my point? They’re set up to fail. Marvel’s on the one hand employing these good writers and talented people of color, but throwing them into an environment that’s openly hostile towards that stuff. They don’t give a shit about diversity. They want their fucking Thor comic, and they want Thor to be a blond-haired Adonis, and they want Black Panther to be what they know Black Panther to be.
 
One step forward and two steps back again.
Eric: Yeah. Up until the election [of Donald Trump] I really felt like, “We’re all on the right side of history. We’re moving in the right direction.” That every generation was more tolerant than the previous generation. You look at where we’ve come as a society in 100 years, and it’s pretty fucking awesome. Then this happens, and you just wonder, “What the fuck? Is everything I thought to be true not true? Are we just going to keep going backwards? Is this just an anomaly? Is this temporary?" We’ve had it pretty good there for a few years.

​​Eric: I've always felt it's really easy to be cynical about the culture. I was definitely brought up that way, to have a healthy dose of cynicism, but I've also always felt pretty optimistic at the same time, with that hope, that clichéd hope that Obama talked about. I've definitely been a believer in that. Now I don't know what the fuck to think anymore.
 
And there's an assault on truth too.
Eric: I agree completely. Assault on truth is a good way to put it. Having a journalistic background, you can appreciate that probably more than a lot of people can.
 
Going back to comics, it seems that a lot more kids are reading graphic novels now, outside of Marvel and DC.
Eric: Part of my point before is that more people are reading comics than ever before, but they’re not buying them in comic book stores. They’re not reading the traditional types of stories that American comics have catered to in the mainstream. They’re reading stuff from Scholastic, like the Raina Telgemeier books, like Jeff Smith’s Bone, manga. Marvel and DC is like fringe culture at this point. The mainstream is books like Sisters and Smile. Younger people are reading comics that they’re not buying in comic book stores. They’re getting them from the libraries, they’re getting them at their schools.

​Eric: I feel like when I was a kid, you either read comics or you didn’t. If you read comics, you read superhero comics, maybe an Archie comic or something. It was really like a niche thing. If you read them, you were a nerd. That’s not a cliché to the point where when I got into high school, you kept it a secret if you read comics. That’s definitely changed. In my daughter’s elementary school, every kid is reading comics. There was no comics section in my school library growing up. There’s a graphic novel section, and it’s the most popular section in the library. It’s really stuff for everybody. There’s stuff for boys, there’s stuff for girls, there’s stuff for kids who like action, stuff for kids who just like to learn about science, there’s graphic novels about everything. That’s really great.

​And people who grow up reading comics are more likely to become artists.
Eric: I think that’s true, and I think we’ll have to see over time how it all plays out. I also think the environment is healthier now. My daughter, she could actually enjoy Love And Rockets in a few years. When I was a kid, it was pretty unusual for a girl to go to a comic book store to buy Love And Rockets. Even though most of the girls who read Love And Rockets loved it, but most of them didn’t even know it existed because they wouldn’t go in the stores. I worked in a comic shop for five years in the ’80s. My girlfriend at that time hated coming into the store. I’d like to think that a lot of these younger people who are reading comics that traditionally wouldn’t have in the past could grow up to enjoy Chris Ware, Roz Chast, Alison Bechdel, or Jaime Hernandez. That’s one healthy aspect of things, I think.

​In addition to his seminal comics Neat Stuff and Hate! and more recently an acclaimed series of biographic graphic novels, Bagge has been involved in multiple groundbreaking projects, collaborating with the likes of Gilbert Hernandez, Alan Moore, Dana Gould and Robert Crumb – a partnership chronicled in the recently released The Book of Weirdo, which you should buy right now, from Lion’s Tooth, of course.

​I was visiting the US from Brazil, interviewing some of the best cartoonists in the world with my photographer friend Carolina Pfister. We had already met Dame Darcy, Kaz and Tony Millionaire, and all three of them told us about a party for Peter Bagge. I'm sorry to say we weren't invited by the actual host, the great Jennifer "Queen Itchie" Nixon, but we decided to go anyway.
 
I have no pictures of that party, only a half-assed drawing in my diary, featuring the worst Peter Bagge portrait ever drawn. It was a bizarre experience to hang out with my art heroes in an intimate get-together in an Alphabet City apartment [actually off Houston St on Attorney according to Jennifer Nixon] – Bagge was there, of course, as well as all the aforementioned cartoonists, plus Joe Coleman, Gary Leib and others. No idea how it got to this, but at one point a lady took her clothes off. As she displayed her truly amazing body, my 23-year-old self thought “oh, no, it’s a suruba” (the Brazilian word for group sex). Luckily, we were standing by Gary Leib, who muttered “don’t worry, it doesn’t get any worse than this”. And it didn’t.

​I went to visit Bagge at MTV a few days later, but Carolina wasn't with me, so there are no photos of that either, and you’ll just have to take my word that I interviewed him back then.
 
In 2017, exactly twenty years later, I met Bagge in Tacoma, where he now lives. He suggested a hip bar and café with 5 stars on Yelp, but it was too noisy for the recording, so we ended up going across the street and drinking cheap beer at a wonderful dive called Fergie’s On the Ave. An old-school hang in a back room filled with day drinkers and gambling machines is the most Bagge experience one could hope for (and every day in Milwaukee, which is why I live here). Bagge’s work is permeated by a genuine appreciation of the middle class and disdain for glamour or fads of any type. It is no wonder his comics resonated so well with the lowbrow grunge aesthetics of the early 90s.

​Over the years there has been talk of other TV projects and movies based on Peter Bagge’s characters. I am partially glad that the mainstream hasn’t “stolen” him from comics yet. I take solace in the fact that there is something unbreakable about his vision, a stubborn cynicism and nostalgia that could be mistaken for conservatism, but is always filled with empathy and authenticity. You can’t take the Bagge out of Bagge, even if he eventually gets the showbiz millions he deserves.
 
This interview has been edited for clarity.

​What made you start making biographical comics about female historical figures [Margaret Sanger, Zora Neale Hurston and Rose Wilder Lane]?
Bagge: Well, this was slowing coming, starting roughly around the year 2000. I started doing more and more nonfiction work, journalistic comics for Reason magazine and other places. Then I also started doing very short biographical comics for various people. It started out as little one-page vignettes about scientists from the past or early American politicians. The subject matter interested me, but I was also trying to get a laugh out of it. I started doing longer biographical pieces, until it reached a point that I thought I could do a full-length biographical comic. It was something I wanted to do, or wanted to try.
 
But why did you decide to concentrate on women?
Bagge: For various reasons, I became very interested in women writers, artists and activists from a specific time period, between the two World Wars. There were certain similarities and a lot of things about them that I found incredibly inspiring. Mainly how independent they were. This is like a full generation before the 60s, and they lived such fiercely independent lives. The work they did was very much on their own terms. Also, when I read about the lives of these women, not surprisingly, I found that they led very adventurous, crazy, insane lives. This was like something you could draw, as opposed to somebody just typing page after page. They did stuff! So I pitched the idea of doing a series on them to Chris Oliveros [then editor at Drawn & Quarterly]. I had several subjects in mind and for various reasons we picked [Margaret] Sanger first.

​Was Chris still at Drawn & Quarterly?
Bagge: Yes. Well, it’s technically still his company. He just doesn't work there full time anymore. He's semi retired, so I believe he shows up at the office once a week... He's a very nice person. He left the company in the hands of Peggy Burns and her husband Tom. Mainly Peggy, I would think.
 
Didn’t he retire to make comics?
Bagge: He's working on something. I know he is and that's another reason why he retired from the company for the most part. Now, I can't remember if it's a novel or a comic book, but he's working on a book, some kind of book.
 
I love the book he did a while ago, The Envelope Manufacturer. It is exactly what you would expect, it looks European [laughs].

​Are there more books coming out in this series of biographies?
Bagge: I'm on the third one [Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story, released in 2019] and it may very well be my last one, at least of this series... It’s another woman, that's pretty much the theme. The company, Drawn & Quarterly, they're very happy with the books and they would like me to keep doing them, keep the series going. Peggy Burns said to me "there's going to be seven, right?" and I don't know where she got that.
 
I have a woman you can feature if you want, a sword swallower.
Bagge: A sword swallower? [laughs]
 
She was amazing. She lived in the same time period. She joined the circus when she was almost 40.
Bagge: What was her name?
 
Mimi Garneau. She was actually a sideshow attraction.
Bagge: I remember Jim Rose [of The Jim Rose Circus]. He didn't have any actual freaks; they were just otherwise normal people who did freaky things to themselves. We had some mutual friends who used to run with him, people who were in his show pretty frequently. It was a similar social circle and-- I don't know how to describe it. They got a bit defensive. We asked them a question and they never gave you a straight answer. Like if I'd say “where are you from?”, they would say, “Mongolia”, and I'm, okay, you’re not from Mongolia. I’m just trying to pick a small talk and you decide to lie to me. Let's be honest, I don't give a f*ck where you are from. [laughs]

​But that’s totally the circus and sideshow mindset, it’s a show business lie.
Bagge: You have a circus fixation. [laughs]
 
Back to the biographic comics you’ve been doing now…
Bagge: Well, this one might be my last, just because it's too much work for not enough money. It's like three solid years to put out one of those.
 
Did you get any backlash for being a male cartoonist and writing about female historical figures? Or a black historical figure [Zora Neale Hurston]?
Bagge: There was so little of that. I remember a lot of people were worried on my behalf that there'd be a big backlash. I wasn’t even aware of it until somebody called me and told me that there were some people complaining on Twitter. I had to look for it, and they weren't addressing me directly. Nobody who had an issue with me being a white guy, writing about a black woman, nobody brought that up with me directly. There was a little bit of noise about it. It was really stupid. I think one of the first people who complained said, "Why was a white man assigned this job?" Like I was hired, like somebody called me up and asked me to do it. I was like, "I wasn't assigned." It was so difficult doing it, actually.

​
​"Hey, I'm actually losing money here."

Bagge: It was while I was working on that book that I reached a point where I pretty much had no choice but to sell my house in Seattle and move to Tacoma. I couldn't afford the mortgage on my house anymore. I'm glad I made that move because now I don't have a mortgage, I'm totally out of debt. I wouldn't have made that move if I wasn't knee deep in this book and not making any money. [laughs] I had almost no income. I was like, "Geez, if there's a woman of color who also wants to lose her house…" Anyway, most people who wrote about the book liked it. There were few complaints.

​Do you feel that artists are being pushed out of major cities because of property costs? How was your transition out of Seattle to Tacoma?
Bagge: It’s not so bad. If I could afford to do it, I would've stayed put just because moving is a pain in the ass. But I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I'm down here now. I like it better down here than up in Seattle. There is hardly any traffic, it's a lot cheaper, people are a lot friendlier. I just am so much more comfortable down here. All my neighbors are super friendly. I would say they're like average Americans. By that I mean they're regular people. I’ll say “people in Tacoma are so friendly” and they are like, "what are you talking about? Why wouldn’t we be friendly?". But I’m comparing them to people in Seattle.
 
[The bartender comes up]
Bartender: Excuse me. Do you want another?
Yes, sure.
Bagge: Me Too.
Bartender: I won't be bugging you anymore.
Bagge: No, it's great.
Bartender: Thank you.
Bagge: They're so nice. [laughs]
 
I know. Everybody is really nice. People are the nicest in Milwaukee too, but sometimes there’s a very subtle passive aggressiveness to it.
Bagge: That could be the Northwest too, but Tacoma is different from Seattle. I haven't gotten that “Tacoma freeze”. I don't think it exists. [laughs].
 
Will you eventually come back to the characters in Hate! or are you done with them?
Bagge: For 10 years I did the annuals. Then they kept selling worse and worse. There just wasn't interest in Buddy Bradley being this old crazy looking guy, who owns a dump, and who's married to a crazy-- People just didn't care anymore. Not enough people cared for me to keep doing it. I was just like, "Ah, forget it. That's enough."

​Were you personally curious about what would happen to the characters?
Bagge: No, I would keep doing it if I was. It's just that nobody was reading it, nobody cared-- I shouldn't say "nobody", but fewer and fewer people. There were too many other things that I also wanted to do, where at least there was more money attached. I've done three graphic novels, two for Dark Horse and one for Vertigo. Apocalypse Nerd might become a TV show [laughs], a cartoon show.
 
I love that book. It reminds me of Shaun of the Dead, the same type of parody.
Bagge: Then there was one called Reset that totally fell through the cracks. I feel like I did that one a little too quickly, because I wrote it and then while I was drawing it, I kept rethinking it, I was rethinking it too much. Then, there’s the one I did for Vertigo, it’s called Other Lives.

​I like that one a lot too.
Bagge: It seemed like hardly anybody read it. It didn't get promoted, it just disappeared. By the time it came out, they were contractually obliged to pay me in full and to release the book. By then DC had its great big turnover. It was all brand-new people there. They printed some copies, gave it to some stores, and that was that. They did absolutely nothing to promote it or let anybody know it existed. A lot of my own fans, when I would bring copies to comic conventions, they'd always be, "What's this?"
 
How fast do you work? Most cartoonists I talk to seem to draw one page a week.
Bagge: Well, I manage to get two, I'm fast [laughs]. I get two pages a week. Adrian Tomine and Dan Clowes, it takes them a week to get a page done as well.
 
Do you think your work will ever be made into a TV show or movie?
Bagge: My work is still routinely being auctioned by Hollywood, but it never gets made. I make some money with the development deals. When I met you, I was at MTV. I went through that whole thing all over again with MTV with a second development deal. Especially Hate! and the Bradleys, Buddy Bradley, there’s been so many-- At least five or six development deals.
 
One thing I remember from talking to cartoonists 20 years ago is that everybody seemed to be waiting for their big break. Everybody seemed to be in the cusp of it. Then I got to Daniel Clowes and he said, "Thank God we're not famous. It would suck. Can you imagine if we were mainstream?"
Bagge: Really? He said that 20 years ago? That's pretty funny. [laughs] It wasn't the fame that attracted me, it was making a decent living, making a good living and being financially secure, because how is a cartoonist supposed to retire? [laughs] You want to be able to make enough to retire. There's all of that.
 
How old is your daughter now?
Bagge: She is 27. Time just flies.

​She's a millennial. I think they're more enlightened, millennials.
Bagge: In some ways, more enlightened, and in some ways, a little bit brainwashed, take your pick.
 
Does your daughter draw?
Bagge: No. She is an elementary school teacher.
 
She didn’t want to draw?
Bagge: No. My wife [Joanne Bagge] is a cook and she didn't want to cook either. We didn't care.
 
What kind of cook is your wife?
Bagge: She just loves to cook. She used to be a professional cook and for eight years her and her sister had a New York style delicatessen. She likes to cook everything. She likes every style of it. People always go “Why don’t you start a restaurant or work for a restaurant again?" She says, "No." It was the biggest lesson I learned when she had her food businesses. She was like, "I only want to cook for people I like, I hate cooking for assholes." To her, food is love.
 
Do you cook?
Bagge: I'm not a cook. My daughter isn't much of a cook either. My daughter, unfortunately, she's like me that way, we don't fully pay attention when we're in the kitchen. It's like, "Everything's under control." I walk away. Don't walk away. [laughter]
 
The reason I asked if your daughter draws is because I recently met Natalia Hernandez [Gilbert Hernandez’ daughter], and she is a pretty good artist. It’s exciting to see a new generation.
Bagge: I think she's not going to go to college to intern for people, filmmakers or people in television.

​So another one bites the dust? Oh, c'mon, not yet. [laughs]
Bagge: She probably sees how hard he works for such little money and she's like, "No, I don't want to do that." [laughter]
 
But back to your wife, doesn’t she collaborate with you in the comics?
Bagge: Yes. My wife does 90% of the coloring. If anything has to be a certain color, I'll cover it first and then she colors it, and then I'll just go over it quickly, but yes, she does the bulk of the work on the coloring.
 
I always remember that story you drew in the beginning of Hate! in which Fantagraphics is an island and you mention that things you considered immoral are acceptable by the mainstream, but then the art you like is considered obscene… Do you feel vindicated by the recognition you and Fantagraphics have gotten since then?
Bagge: In some ways. We used to always make fun of that line, “comics aren't just for kids anymore.” For decades people always felt if they'd write about any of us or all of us, they had to put that in the title somewhere. They don't say that anymore. Now everybody knows that comics aren't just for kids anymore. But it's still a struggle to get people to pay more attention to alternative comics. One thing that wound up being somewhat disastrous is that just when we thought we were breaking superheroes’ stranglehold on the comics medium, all of a sudden, CGI movies exploded. I was tongue-in-cheek saying to somebody who is in the movie industry, "It's almost like those movies ruined the whole comic book industry all over again." And the person I was talking to said, "They ruined the movie industry too." [laughter] They ruin everything. That's all everybody goes to see, that's all everybody talks about.

​No kidding. It’s like we’re going backwards.
Bagge: I want to tell the story about when we sold our old house and bought a new house. I was on the phone for a long time with my house insurance company, my insurance provider. The insurance company is based in Texas, but I'm talking to a man on the phone and he's using a very business accent. At one point he was trying to draw up some figures. While I was waiting, he decided to make some small talk and he said, "What do you do for a living?" I said, "I'm a cartoonist." Then his Texas accent came right out and he goes, "All right, I got a question for you. Superman versus Batman." He goes, "That's the new movie, right?" I go “Yes”. I'm so used to this, so I'm “Okay.” He goes, "What is the deal with that? They're both good guys." [laughs] "But now they're fighting." He goes, "What's that all about? Did they run out of ideas or what?" I go “Yes, that's exactly what happened.” [laughs] They had Superman fight Batman in the comics a million times. They've run out of ideas a million times. [laughs]

Dame Darcy was the first cartoonist I interviewed during that visit to the U.S. in the ’90s. She was (and is) a goddess to me. I used to order her Meat Cake comic directly from Fantagraphics and each issue was an absolute treasure, so I was more than eager to meet her at her apartment in New York City. So eager that I got there too early with my photographer friend Carolina Pfister. Darcy was asleep and we had to wait almost an hour for her to get into her gorgeous Victorian get up.
These days it seems that everyone is a “renaissance” person, but few are as deserving of that title as Dame Darcy. Besides writing and drawing comics, she is a gifted sign painter, doll maker, and banjo player (she also plays the saw). Back in the ’90s she starred in her own public access show, Turn Of The Century, with skits, stop motion animation shorts, and special guests such as Courtney Love. This connection has been chronicled by Darcy in a comic strip and in this article. She is also a mermaid, a witch, and she can read your future. Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has raved about her divination abilities and she even used to do long distance palm reading if you sent her a Xerox of your hand.
In 1997 Darcy read my palm and told me the worst of my life was over, but I would be late to find true love and wouldn’t have kids—not what I wanted to hear at that time. She repeated these predictions this fall over watermelon strawberry salad and shrimp rolls. She also brought along her doll Isabelle, who added her own unique touch to our reunion.
This interview has been edited for clarity.

Darcy: Isabelle was begging to come out, so I flipped a coin. I flip a coin to make a lot of important decisions. The coin said yes, and so Isabelle came out tonight.
Isabelle: I wanted to, it's time I get what I want!
Darcy: Isabelle, this is not your interview, you don't talk.
Isabelle: I can talk if I want to.
 
Feel free to add anything you want, Isabelle.
Isabelle: I can talk if I want to!
Darcy: She's really bratty. She put on a really fancy dress for this occasion.
[The waiter brings Isabelle a tiny drink.]
Darcy: I appreciate that. [About the waiter] She cares about dolls.
Isabelle: It's called small fabricated people, get with it, bitches!
​Darcy: That's a new politically correct term. "Small fabricated people."

​Isabelle has been with you forever. Did her personality change over the years?
Darcy: No. She's ready and horrible, and insane as always, slutty. A super whore and a total drunk. She never changed this whole time. Me, I've had to step it up. I've started paying taxes. I've had to build a credit score. The thing is, when you move to Savannah the prices are like 1990 compared to Manhattan, so you actually have a chance to put money aside to build your business, build your credit score, do all the things.
 
Have you been able to make a living out of comic books or cartooning?
Darcy: Yes, but only because I started doing bigger graphic novels on major publishing companies, and getting bigger advances. I did Jane Eyre, Gasoline, Frightful Fairy Tales. All of those came out when I was in LA. I was also selling my fine art in LA. Because it's easier to break into the fine art market in LA than in New York. New York is way harder, there's a lot more people trying that.

​Where are you from, originally?
Darcy: I'm from Idaho Falls, Idaho, which is a four-hour journey from the border of Utah. The closest city was Salt Lake City. There's 80% Mormon where I'm from and I'm not Mormon.
 
What was your family like?
Darcy: I have a lot of brothers. There's nothing to cure you of wanting a baby more than being the oldest of a bunch of kids. I think everybody who wants to be a parent should volunteer and help little kids with their homework after school, and pick them up and take them to school, change diapers, change peepee sheets. Put them down for naps, take care of troubled teens and advise them, and if you did all that and thought it was so great, then have a baby. It would help society and all those psycho cat ladies would have a place to put their nurturing gene.
 
When we first met in '97 you had been in New York for a while already, right?
Darcy: Yes, I moved there in '92. I applied to art school in a bunch of different places: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles. I ended up getting a scholarship in San Francisco, so I went there for four years, and then I went to New York City because I always wanted to be a New Yorker. I was there for 10 years, and then an additional eight years later, but that time I was bicoastal, New York-LA. I moved to New York because I knew it would be a good place for publishing, a place that cares about underground cartoonists, and it would be a good foundation to start my career, and it was. San Francisco was too, because Crumb started there, they care about comics and know what it is.

​How did you get involved with comics?
Darcy: I started self-publishing zines, photocopy zines, during the whole zine trend in the early '90s. I went on tour with Lisa Suckdog, she did her zine, I was in her zine, that kind of stuff. Then I got published by an independent company that wasn't as big as Fantagraphics to start with. Back then, if you got published, you did tours and that was the only way that you'd be seen, there was no social media and all this craziness. But the old school '90s way cuts through all of that social media crap, with real-life experiences, being able to draw with your hand, all that still has the edge it always did.

​
​Darcy: I'm doing a combination of old school and social media now.
Isabelle: Instagram be "Isagram", bitches!
Darcy: She's drunk already, that's why she's saying "Isagram". Isabelle thinks she's going to get so famous that she's going to take over Instagram. Anyway, I was doing my comic book series [Meat Cake] in New York City, getting published in New York magazines, and doing animation. I had my cabaret night, Naughty Nautical Night, and I had my TV show, Turn of the Century, with Lisa Hammer.

​How did you end up in LA?
Darcy: My mom's from LA, I always went to LA as a kid, I had a boyfriend in LA when I was a teen, and I always knew that I was going to live in LA one day. Also because I always wanted to create a feature film of my comic book, or a TV series, or something. Then I got my first movie optioned, it was called Planet Blue, and they didn't produce it, which is a thing that happens. Part of it because I wasn't writing it and getting it produced, part of it because I just sold it as intellectual property. That happens a lot and I got it. But I still got money. Then Gasoline was published and it got optioned as well. Again, that movie didn't get produced so by then I'm over it. I'm like, "I'm out. I'm going back to New York City." I go back to New York, I meet one of my soul mates, I've met more than one. But then he turns into a big jerk and dumps me, breaks my heart. We were sharing the rent. Our rent was $3,000. I was in my late 30s at this point. 39. First, I had to pay twice the amount of money on rent because he was gone. Second, the rent was going up even higher than $3,000. Third, they were going to end up selling the building or kicking us out at some point anyway because that's what always happens in New York, so I had to start thinking of a place where I could buy property that's cheap.
[Isabelle screams]
Darcy: Sorry, don't fall off the chair! Jeez, okay, honey. Here. She hasn't even been drinking that much. Anyway, what was I saying? I'm sorry.

​When did you come to Savannah?
I moved here in 2012.
 
Why Savannah?
Darcy: I saw a place in my mind. I can remember this day so clearly. I was in my apartment in Manhattan, on Ludlow Street in Chinatown, and I was looking up the street toward the skyline. We had a really good view, actually, and I saw this vision. I was like, "Okay, it's got antebellum architecture, yet it's got tropical plants and palm trees. Is this Trinidad?"
 
You had the vision before you knew where it was?
Darcy: Yes, and I was like, "Is this Uruguay? Is this Trinidad and Tobago? Is this Cuba? Is this somewhere in America?" I saw the vision and I was like, "Okay, if I find out where that is, I can buy property and I can control my own life." Then I came to a friend's wedding here and I discovered it was here. I was like, "It's a two-hour flight from New York, I'll totally go there." I came and moved into a gay house called the Rainbow House.
 
A community house?
Darcy: For gay men. I was like Smurfette there. I was scared of Southerners, for good reason, they are racist and it's scary. They're Trump supporters and it's scary. I knew there would be scary rednecks here, so I hid in the gay community like it was my nunnery. I eventually moved out to my own place.
 
[Isabelle stares at Cris] She keeps looking at me.
Darcy: I know. She's got those creepy side eyes.
 
(To Isabelle): Turn around a little for me, Isabelle.
Isabelle: I'd rather not.
Darcy: She loves Marilyn Monroe, they're both Geminis. Marilyn Monroe was a sex doll. And Isabelle is a sex doll. That's why she likes Marilyn.

​How do you deal with the conservative side of Savannah?
Darcy: I know how to deal because I was raised in Idaho. High school was like prison. I had only a few choices because I was marginalized. If you're a skinny Goth girl and you're only 15 and these big scary guys with mullets and cowboy boots that are jocks are going to threaten to rape and kill you, you don't really have a whole lot to work with. Even though that was a hardcore and brutal situation to be in as a young girl, it did prepare me for Trump's Red States of America. This world that we live in now, I already went through this in the '80s as a teenager. Trump won and that was nightmarish, but I knew what to do because I lived in Idaho as a teen.
 
Have you been able to do more art, living in a less expensive city?
Darcy: I make enough money online to live here [Dame Darcy runs a successful Etsy store], but I need to make extra to get a house. I've had different jobs here. I was teaching painting and got fired for being a witch when The Handbook for Hot Witches came out. I got two book deals at the same time. One was about female murderers, written by Tori Telfer, called Lady Killers.

​What is the screenplay like?
Darcy: It's a nautical pirate adventure, a linear story instead of all the little chopped up stories like Meat Cake usually is. I wrote in a role for Isabelle, so she's going to be a giant movie star, which is why she'll take over Instagram and then it will be "Isagram". She did a live Instagram video stream on her birthday. For 45 minutes she was opening her gifts. She got a pet bat from her fans. Look at this photo. That's a nasty one. She has no humbleness.
Isabelle: Yes, that's because I'm sexy!
Darcy: She just thinks she's great.

​Darcy: Anyway, I was in Chicago for a month while I was on tour. It was in Halloween, it was October, I went to a hundred Halloween parties and they have the most amazing new Goth music scene. I love Chicago! It's my favorite now because New York got too dumb.
 
I remember you showed a film in Chicago, in the same festival I did, back in the early 2000s. ["Women in the Director's Chair"]
Darcy: I think I did, with Lisa Hammer. Oh my God. I love how our paths keep crossing. That's so great.

​You're working in production now, right? Set design?
Darcy: I'm working in The Underground Railroad series for Amazon [based on the novel by Colson Whitehead and directed by Barry Jenkins], which I can't wait to see. I do a lot of the repetitive little stuff. I'm into aging and dyeing. Those are my specifics, aging and dyeing.
 
With the double meaning...
Darcy: Yes, I'm really good at gracefully aging and dying. [laughs] I'm aging and dyeing huge, massive amounts of rope in this big cauldron of dye, stirring it with a broomstick, outside, in the heat. Nothing could have been more perfect because I'm super Goth and they're making me age all this stuff: furniture, silver dishes...
Isabelle: She looks really butch when she goes to work.
Darcy: Yes, we've been definitely dressed down a lot at work. We basically wear what we wear on a farm or crewing on a boat and it's hot and sweaty. And I wear pants, which is really weird. I have this little room in the back, it's my Goth girl cave. Everybody's like, "Don't you want to go to set? Don't you want to see what the action is?" I'm like, "No." I'm also painting hand-painted signs. My dad is a sign painter and I was raised in a sign shop. I was trained to paint signs when I was a kid. My baby brother is really good at it, too.

​Tell me about the haunted hotel you're planning, the Meat Cake Manor.
Darcy: It's going to be great. It's going to be an art gallery and also a B&B. We're going to do healing from trauma meditations, tarot readings with my tarot decks, the Mermaid tarot deck and the Alice tarot, and séances, and doll crafting. There's going to be a Zen library. And everything is for sale. All the art is for sale, all the dolls are for sale. Anything you see anywhere, all the lamps, accessories, clothing. Enter and exit through the gift shop. No one can kick me out, nobody can sell my building, nobody can screw me over.
 
Are you doing that project by yourself?
Darcy: With my boyfriend. He is a successful artist as well. His name is Mr. Pleasant. His dad was a sign painter too and he learned how to sign paint from him, that's how I met him. He's from here, but he also lived in Manhattan at the same time I did. When you interviewed me [in 1997], he lived two blocks away on 5th Street. But we never met. I've been with Pleasant three and a half years.
Isabelle: He's my boyfriend too!
Darcy: Yes, my doll stole him, stole my boyfriend. She always steals my boyfriends. She steals my drink too, as you can see.
Isabelle: Whatever.
Darcy: Meat Cake Manor is going to be a sustainable compound too, like a sustainable utopian compound where my godchildren can live after all of the water runs out and the ocean is full of plastic and all people are doomed. I have 13 godchildren. I love the confidence these people have in my abilities to take care of their kids, but half of them are older now. I'm very honored and I take it seriously, I try to keep in touch with everybody. It's hard because there's 13, but I love that I have a coven of godchildren.

Do you think Savannah will survive the climate apocalypse?
Darcy: This place will survive because water falls from the sky and, in the future, water will be gold. The desert is not the place to live. The thing about Savannah is, it gets extremely hot in the summer, but people forget that it is temperate because it's subtropical. Not tropical like Florida, subtropical, so it stays very temperate, eight, maybe nine months of the year. It only goes above 90 degrees for four months and those four months it's like a freaking nightmare apocalypse where you feel like your face is melting off. It's so hardcore that people forget it's only for four months. So, as long as we have our power source, we can keep our AC going. As long as we're off the grid, we'll be fine. Also, nobody gets to come into the Meat Cake Manor unless they pay for a room or unless they know lyrics to Siouxsie songs [laughs]. If you don't know who I'm talking about, if you don't know what I'm talking about, you don't get to come in, bitch. That's a very good barometer.
Isabelle: Yeah, right? I know! [Sings:] "Following the footsteps of a rag doll dance, we are entranced, spellbound!"
Darcy: That's Isabelle's favorite song, obviously! All of her shit is always self referential. She thinks that Interview with the Vampire is a rom-com about two dads and their daughter. She doesn't know it's a horror movie. She identifies with the little girl, because she doesn't age!
 
Yes, isn't she's supposed to be 90?
Isabelle: I'm 92 now!
Darcy: Yes, Isabelle was born in 1927.
Isabelle: 1927!
 
Savannah does seem like the perfect place for a haunted hotel.
Darcy: Yes! I was a ghost host in a haunted house game, an immersive game, for three years. I would put together the games, and give people clues, and host the thing. Only 100,000 people live here, but three million people come through Savannah as tourists. There is a huge tourist industry especially for the haunted, and gothic, and ghost stuff.

​[Tubeway Army's "Are Friends Electric" starts playing over the restaurant's speakers]
Darcy: By the way, this is one of my favorite songs.
Isabelle: God, it's a classic!
Darcy (to Isabelle): We saw him live, remember?
Isabelle: Yes, we saw Gary Numan.
Darcy: Anyway, Isabelle, please be quiet.
 
When I first met you in 1997 you invited us to a party for Peter Bagge in Queen Itchie's apartment [Queen Itchie is the moniker of zinester/artist Jenny Nixon].
Darcy: Yes, she's in LA. She's doing okay. She was married to Johnny Ryan for a while. I'm in touch with her, but I don't hang out with her like I used to. Weirdly, I don't remember that party at all, but I went out in New York every fricking night for over a decade. I can't remember everything.
 
You also told me about your funeral arrangements. Are they still the same or have they changed? What do you want to do with your body when you pass away?
Darcy: Okay, I know that I wanted to be taxidermied and put on the front of a ship like a bowsprit on my boat, called "The Goddess". Of course I'm eventually getting a boat here because it's a nautical town. I also went to school to be a captain and get a sea captain's license, but I ended up not getting it because I failed my trigonometry.

​Darcy: Anyway, I really loved that plan. I still think it's cute. What Isabelle wants me to do is this thing... they take the bones of your ancestors, the ashes, and make it into a vase or something with Delft porcelain, and we love it. Isabelle wants to make a porcelain doll of me, so we can hang out forever, and ever, and ever. We have our little godchildren, they could inherit us. The problem is, I don't want to do that either because I don't want to get stuck here... I don't want to be a ghost. Maybe because I'm a ghost in real life, in my afterlife I won't have to be one. I've been a ghost since I was 13. My first suicide attempt was when I was 13 and ever since then I have been a ghost, kind of, which has been kind of freeing, because I don't give a shit. I've been through the valley of death and I survived. I died and came back to life. There's something really liberating in that. I'm not afraid of death. That's what makes me the ultimate Goth.
 

​Are you afraid of anything?
Darcy: Physical pain, which is why I don't have a baby. I'm afraid of all kinds of shit, like when our bodies start to breakdown. I have a twisted ankle and bad knees and sciatic shit. Aging is real. We would have been dead by now. That's why menopause is like a thing they're just focusing on now, because women used to die before menopause.
[New Order's Blue Monday starts playing]
Darcy: This is another of the songs in my DJ set. It's funny, they're playing all of the stuff I play in my car because we're the only ones here, so I'm vibing this. [laughs]

​Can you talk about what it is like to be a female cartoonist?
Darcy: I was taught feminists can do anything that guys can do. That's why I'm working on the set making the same money as the guys. That's why I have my own world, my own career, my own haunted house hotel, blah, blah. I can do what I want, but it's really a shame it takes us more of our time, more struggle, more blood, sweat, and tears, then we're getting judged by our beauty on top of it. Look, I am an alpha bitch. I can be friends with other alpha bitches who are not toxic and we can all be alpha bitch. Do you see what I mean? We can do our power thing together... and I'll help the beta bitches too, who don't want to be power bitches because it's really hard to do this, so it's fine. I'll just help the girls out, be supportive.
 
With all these projects, do you think you will continue to make comics?
Darcy: Oh, yeah. I'm not going to stop until I freaking die. They can try and stop me, bitches. [laughs]

In 2017, one day before getting married in Vegas (by the real Elvis, in case you’re wondering), my then-future-husband Brock and I met legendary cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez, his wife Carol Kovinick Hernandez, and their daughter Natalia Hernandez (also a cartoonist) for coffee, a light meal and a group interview. I had not seen or spoken to Gilbert in 20 years.
Gilbert Hernandez and his brothers Jaime and Mario started writing and drawing their magazine Love And Rockets in the early 1980s. It is a legendary publication and still my absolute favorite comic book. Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez were the first cartoonists I interviewed in my journalistic career in Brazil. We talked on the phone in 1996 as they announced that issue number 50 of Love And Rockets would be the last one—and it was, until 2016, when the brothers went back to the original format, currently in number 7. They never stopped making comics, though. To understand the various incarnations of their work check out Fantagraphics’ guide on How to Read Love and Rockets.
In 1997 I quit my dream job at MTV Brazil to travel around the United States for two months interviewing my favorite cartoonists. Meeting the Hernandez brothers in person was at the very top of my list. I talked to them at the San Diego Comic Con and then visited their homes in Los Angeles.
This interview is part of a series of articles in which I revisit the folks I met on that trip. It has been edited for clarity.

​Let's start at the beginning. (To Gilbert and Carol) How did you two meet?
Gilbert Hernandez: We met the first time that The Clash played in Los Angeles.
Carol Kovinick Hernandez: Yes, the first tour. [laughs] When we first knew each other, I didn't know that he wrote comics or he could draw or anything.
Gilbert: It was a secret.
Carol: He later said that he and Jaime could draw and were writing comics. So that was interesting. I got to see the whole thing as it happened, you know?
 
(To Natalia) Are you a comic book artist too?
Natalia Hernandez: I've been trying to do some comics. I did a backup story for DC and that was really exciting. I like doing it, but I don't know if I'm any good. [laughs] I have fun.
 
Are you also going into filmmaking?
Natalia: Oh, yes. I love film. I love cinema. I just like telling stories. So, I'm just going to try all sorts of mediums and see what works out.
 
Did you read comics as a kid?
Natalia: Yes. My dad introduced me to the comics he read. He'd be like, "Oh, I'm going to show you this today." And he'd read it to me before bed or show me all sorts of stuff. He'd show me the Venus stories [Gilbert's comics for kids] but he wouldn't really show me a lot of his work. [laughs]

​I read somewhere that you weren't allowed to read Gilbert's comics as a kid because of the adult content.
Natalia: He's a dad, so he wants me to read his comics when I'm 80. [laughs] My friends, they think it's cool. I'm kind of in this fun liberal bubble and it's nice. [laughs] When I was little I was mad. I couldn't believe it, like, "I can't read this? What do you mean?" Now I get it, it makes sense. Before, I was all offended.
Gilbert: The problem is that I could not show her things, and her friends would go "Look."
Natalia: Like, "Look what your dad does." I'm like, "Yep."
Gilbert: It's interesting because Jaime and I have done kids in our comics, and stories about them, and their feelings and this and that. People assume it's for kids, but it has never been for kids. People say "Oh, I read your comics to my kids all the time. --How old is your kid? --Seven." I go, "That's not for a seven year old." I don't stop them, but I have to say these stories are for adults, and I don't mean in an X-rated way, just for an adult reader, the mindset of an adult.
 
Was Natalia around when you drew the Venus stories?
Gilbert: No, that was before. Some of the Venus stories were for adult readers, but I drew ones that were actually for kids. And when we collected them, the book was too short, so I added a new story and Natalia was young when I did that.
 
Did you get inspiration from having a little girl in the house?
Gilbert: Probably. I wanted to make a comic that she could read, that she could look at. That’s what that was for, really.
Natalia: I enjoyed it. I thought it was great. I was always like, "I wonder what my dad does." I knew he made comics but I never really saw them. This was like, "Oh, man, I can show it to my friends." Exciting. [laughter]
Carol: What’s funny is he used to draw little kids that looked like her before she was born, and then after she was born every once in a while I'd go, "This looks like Natalia". Some of the kids in the backgrounds and stuff. And then later I'd see things in Venus and "Oh my gosh, she is doing the exact same thing".
Gilbert: It might have been like my cousins and Lucinda, my sister, who had these mannerisms when she was little. Natalia is a lot like my sister Lucinda when she was young, and some of my cousins, so it could have come from that.
 
Most of the strong characters in Love and Rockets are female. You rarely show the perspective of a male character. I mean, really, Khamo doesn't say anything. [laughter]
Carol: His mom and his aunts and his grandmothers raised him, so maybe that's what it is.
Gilbert: Yes, that's a big part of it, I think. Because when you grow up the men are doing what they do, but the women are more involved in the family.
 
(To Carol): I remember seeing you as a character in Love and Rockets. You win the beauty pageant.
Gilbert: Yes. I thought it would be a nice thing, a nice gesture. I had to have the main character Maria loose. They had to have a winner and "Who am I going to put for the winner?"
Carol: It was a really nice surprise, yes. [laughs]

​You worked at Fantagraphics for a while, right?
Carol: A little bit, yes, when they moved to California, shortly afterwards. Gary Groth asked me if I wanted to and I thought, "Well yes, sure."
 
Do you draw?
Carol: Yes, I actually made a mistake, in college, Jaime and I took an art class together. It was horrible because I look at what he's doing and what I'm doing and I'm like, "Oh my God, what am I even bothering for?"
 
(To Gilbert): Can you talk about Garden of Flesh?
Gilbert: I just wanted to take a break from what I was doing and make a funny adaptation of the Bible or Adam and Eve. Robert Crumb made one a few years before but everybody complained at how sad and dismal it was. It became a thing, kind of a joke. For some reason, any good depictions, at least in comics and most movies, it’s never a pleasant thing anymore.
I remember growing up thinking there was a lot of joy to faith. There was a lot of joy to people believing. It wasn’t all "evil priest". There was that, but that wasn't the core of it. It was decent people following a decent path, and I knew that that existed. So I decided to go to the root and use Adam and Eve as happy. [laughter] They make their mistake, of course, and then everything happens, but they were essentially decent people. People go, "You made them like airheads." They were cavemen. They knew nothing except enjoying the garden.

​Garden of Flesh is so explicit, but you've been blanking out the boobs in Love and Rockets with a "must be 18" tag. What's that all about?
Gilbert: I'm doing it for a laugh. It's just a joke because I still want Love and Rockets to have a broader audience than other comics. There are still people interested in it and the stories I'm personally doing right now interfere with that. So I'm doing the joke of putting that. I must be a dick because I'm actually taking that away.
 
Well, some of your work is very difficult to read in public, I'll tell you that.
Gilbert: Yes, I'm actually moving a lot of that stuff out of Love and Rockets. It has nothing to do with censorship or trying to please pressure groups. I just decided it would be better that way.
 
I have a Luba tattoo, but it's Luba as a kid. I didn't want to tattoo her giant boobs. [laughter]
Gilbert: Oh, you just have a fake.
 
It seems that Luba-sized boobs have become more common.
Gilbert: Yes. It was weird in the early days of the comic, and then, after a while, everybody was like, "She just looks like a lady you see at the mall".

​I've also noticed you're using a device for flashbacks, surrounding the panels with thicker lines.
Gilbert: I'm doing that specifically with the new Love and Rockets because it gives the reader a chance to understand what's going on right away. I've been very vague in the past. For a long time, I've had dream-like techniques, where you wouldn't know if it was the past or if it was a dream. You weren't sure about it, but I realized that people lost interest. So I listened to the readers. Just to clarify everything. I have the little captions that say, "Pipo's house", "the beach house", "Fritz's and Pipo's beach house". I say where they are now because I would often throw the characters into a new scene without telling you where they were. I didn't realize how much that was confusing readers.
 
Thinking back to our conversations in the late 90s. At that point there were very few Latinx alternative cartoonists, and now there are many Latinx comics conventions and artists working in all genres.
Gilbert: The 80s created the indie comic scene, so there's a freedom now for young people to go and not have to worry about dealing with the big companies or whatever if they have artistic aspirations to comics. That's great. There are many young people making indie comics. They're usually personal, the better ones. They don't even know Love and Rockets because it's been that many years. They hadn't been born yet. Now if you like comics and want to draw them, there's a place where you can get a good start. Even Natalia, if she did comics in the past, there wasn't always a place for her to put her comics out. We could've gone to a convention and sold them, but it would've been a little thing. Now people want to see her comics. She draws just as well as a lot of the indie beginners in comics, and these are older people. It's good that way, it's really open. Also, Jaime and I are old veterans now. People take us a little more seriously, and that's nice.
 
Did you just turn 60 [in 2017]?
Gilbert: Yes. It's a weird number, because when I was a kid growing up, 60 meant old. You're an old man and that's how it's going to be now. I suppose it's true, but I don't feel it.
 
How old is Luba now?
Gilbert: I'm drawing her around 60ish, but she should be closer to 70. I slowed things down because I don't want them to be too old too fast. She's only in her early 60's, mid-60's maybe.

​In our first interviews you said you felt like celebrities in conventions and among your cartoonist friends, but then you went back home, and you were all alone. Is that still true?
Gilbert: Yes. I've heard writers say that too. You can go out in the world, you can go to a convention or to a university to speak, which we've done often. A convention where everybody really likes your work and they're all happy to see you. You go to a comic store and if they know who you are, they're always really nice and this and that, which is great. Then you go home and when it's time to work, you have to be by yourself. It has to be quiet.
Back in the 80s, when we first went to England, or the one time we went to England, we had just gotten back from a convention in Dallas, Texas where we were guests. In the audience was Carol and another woman, who was there just to date Gary [Groth] and that was it, that was the audience.
Carol: That was at a panel. Nobody came.
Gilbert: We were used to that, "Oh, well, nobody came...", so no big deal. We go to London, it was an auditorium filled with people.
Carol: When they came out on stage, Jaime's wife at the time and I were thinking, "Okay, we'll clap because we didn't know if anybody is going to know who they are." And they came out and everybody cheered them and we were shocked. They all knew them, it was a packed auditorium and that was like, wow. [laughs]
Gilbert: Yes, it was a big deal.
 
(To Gilbert): You and Jaime are both influenced by Archie Comics - what other influences do you see in your work?
Gilbert: Gosh, there's so many, because I work almost on an unconscious level. I think the Archie comics one is probably-- it's almost like we decided to do Archie comics for adults, but for real, not a parody or anything like that. Take basically what we liked about Archie comics and then bring it into our own thing. Because a few of the artists that worked in Archie comics were actually very good. They were working in that style, but they were actually very good artists and they communicated a lot better than many of the Marvel and DC guys, who I liked for their own different reasons. You throw a stack of comics in front of a bunch of kids and they'll gravitate to the Archie comics.
 
When I was a kid in Brazil I had an American Betty and Veronica comic book, but I didn't know how to read English, so I made up what the characters were saying. And when I actually learned English it was like, "Oh, the stories are dumb." Then as I teenager I read Love and Rockets and I was like, "This is what I thought Archie comics were like, this is what I wanted them to be."
Gilbert: That's funny because the cartoonist Lynda Barry said the same thing. She said she loved Archie comics as a kid and then when she went back to them, she goes, "Oh, these are for small children. But there's comics here. Oh yeah, you can use this, but to make real comics."

​What brought you and your family to Vegas?
Gilbert: We were living in Los Angeles and our landlords were going to sell the house. It just basically got unaffordable in LA. It's terrible. I don't know how people live there, who are not in show business. It just got to be too much because we needed a house for Natalia.
 
The house I visited in 97 was great.
Gilbert: Yes, it was a nice little house.
Carol: It was small.
Gilbert: But the good landlords sold it to the evil landlord. That's what happened, basically.
Carol: Yes. [laughs]
Gilbert: We were just "let's go find a house". She needs the yard, and it was just impossible. At the very same time, Carol found out about how there was a big boom in construction in Las Vegas.
Carol: We looked, and we were like, "Wow we can actually have a real house here."
Gilbert: A real nice house.
Carol: Yes, and we're still close enough to visit family. It's like a five-hour drive.
 
(To Natalia): How was it, growing up in Vegas?
Natalia: It's normal for me. I mean, I like it. When I was little, I was like "Oh, I'm a Vegas kid," but now it's cool.
 
Did you think it was bad to be a Vegas kid?
Natalia: Well, no. I just wanted to be Californian, because everyone in my family is Californian. I felt left out. [laughs] The beach is a thing, and here all we've got is a weird lake. I don't know how I did it, but I would play outside everyday. In shorts and flip flops, without water, in million-degree heat, but it was normal in the desert. That's my Vegas experience. The strip is there, but for me it's just the restaurants. I guess I'll never have that tourist feeling of, "Oh, wow, Vegas," because it's just home.
Carol: It's too crazy. You kind of have to know where to go.

​(To Gilbert) Do you research the things you draw in your graphics novels?
Gilbert: Yes, it used to be real difficult to do research, so I avoided it because it was difficult to find a type of car, a type of gun... So I thought, "Why am I researching guns?" I just took a generic shape and made the same gun every time. In the graphic novel Maus, the Art Spiegelman book, there's a scene where he's just finished talking to his dad, and he's walking home. He goes, "Now, I got to find a picture of an old press." An old drill press. Because it had to be 1932 and he had to get the right one. That was before Google, you know?
Natalia: He has a box of Hot Wheel cars, just different cars, and I used to play with them all the time. I think he still stores them.
Gilbert: I would draw cars using my toy cars, yes.
Carol: They were the reference material. [laughs]
Gilbert: But the problem is that they get dated quickly. All the cars are from 1979. [laughs]

​A question for everybody. Every time I read Love and Rockets I end up crying my eyes out. Do you cry when you read it, or do you cry while you write it, Gilbert?
Gilbert: Nah.
Natalia: Well, I haven't really read the stuff. I know I got to get around to it.
Gilbert: She is allowed now. [laughs]
Natalia: All my life I've heard people say, "Oh, this gets me real emotional." Okay, I guess I could feel that way. I'll get there.
Carol: I've cried, but usually I will talk to him, "Wait, what is this? When did this happen?" and since it's him, I don't know if I can totally-- I mean, those characters are him. So it's a little different.
 
How clearly do you see Gilbert in his characters?
Carol: Actually, Luba is the most him.
Gilbert: She's the most like me. [laughs]
Carol: So it's weird for me. I can't completely separate it.
Gilbert: I'll tell you when we cry. It's when we get the paycheck. [laughs]
Carol: I was really sad, though, right at the beginning of Heartbreak Soup. When the kids grew up. I wanted to see more of their lives when they were still young. He had them grow up too quick for me. I mean, that was my thing because I love them.

​(To Gilbert) Who are your favorite new cartoonists working today?
Gilbert: Well, this is going to be a useless answer but I haven't been really paying attention to new cartoonists right now. I just haven't. I've been working so much on my own comics. I do three comics at once, at the same time. I really just dropped by the wayside of who is new. People have to tell me, you have to tell me.
 
How about Simon Hanselmann?
Gilbert: I'm glad you brought him up. Yes, he's really good. There was actually a couple of things he drew that were so outrageously funny they kind of inspired me to do Blubbler [Gilbert's ongoing adult series]. It was just a little rude drawing, I don't even remember what it was, just that it was really funny to me. I go, "This should just be a whole comic book."

​Carol: I haven't been reading comics for a long time. I mean, anything new. We have a lot of old stuff in the house, he has collections.
 
What are your all-time favorites?
Carol: I still love Mad Magazine, the old ones. That was the first time I saw who drew what and so I knew who I liked better and that sort of thing. I have some of those little book collections and those are fun to go back to.
 
(To Natalia) What about you?
Natalia: I'm trying to think of new stuff, but lately I've been really into Jim Woodring's things. I just love his stuff. The weirder, the better, and it's surreal. And I got really into Junji Ito, which is horror manga. I'm way into that right now. But I'm trying to think of something new because that's kind of older. I don't know. Lesley Stein, I love her stuff. I have a couple of her books. Fantagraphics will send a package to my dad, I'll flip through it and grab stuff, that's usually what I get.
Carol: When he first showed me comics, I loved Drew Friedman's stuff.

​
​I remember talking to alternative cartoonists in 1997 and everyone said "We're superheroes in our own minds, but the world hasn't come around to our way of thinking." Now it seems like many of you got the recognition you deserved. Do you feel vindicated, 20 years later?
Gilbert: I don't think of it that way. I mean, I'm happy that people say, "Hey, it's great you've been doing this for this many years and dah dah dah." That's all good. But it's a work in progress. I still feel like I'm in the middle, trying to get to my better work, whatever that is. See, because I don't even know what that is. That's the way you look at it and I'm happy, but I'm aware of the technical aspects. Being around for 35 years and still doing comics that people want to see, that right there tells me that's good.
It seems that the biggest conflict was being able to make a living out of comics, which many people have not been able to do.
Gilbert: Many cartoonists stop because they can't keep drawing and work at the same time, or find work at the same time. That's what's distressing, really, that's the thing. You get a lot of praise like, "I love this comic," but it's hard to make ends meet. That's where a lot of the frustration comes in. There's the ego thing, like, "They should like my comic more." But that's not an issue, the issue is trying to continue because of the economics.
 
Have you been able to do it?
Gilbert: I've been able to do it by having different jobs, though. Doing different comics for different companies. I'm able to do that, but some cartoonist aren't. They can only do the one thing they do, and it doesn't sell. I'm able to move around and do different comics.

​Palomar has always been south of the U.S. border, but not specifically Mexico, right? Did it become more like Mexico when the characters came to America?
Gilbert: I actually changed that. It no longer says, "Below the U.S. border." Now it says, "Outside the U.S. border" because there are other countries around, islands, so I wanted to include everybody, all the different Latino countries. I can do a story that's about Mexicans, but in a different context. But Palomar is going to remain in everybody's mind that we're all from there.
Here's a sideline. If it ever becomes a TV show or a movie, none of the cultures can complain, "How come you don't have more Mexican actors? How come you don't have more Colombian actors?" Because that's a problem in Hollywood. So I've created a fantasy world where I didn't want that to happen.
 
Just Latinx.
Gilbert: Yes, and so, luckily, it's going to work out if there's a film or a television show, I'll still go with that.
 
Your name is Gilberto, right? How did it become Gilbert?
Gilbert: I went to school. It's first grade. The teacher goes, "Do you want to be 'geel-ber-toh' or Gilbert?" I'm, "What the hell do you think?" [laughs]
Carol: What's a 'geel-ber-toh'? [laughs]
Gilbert: I was, like, "Geel-ber-toh? That sounds awful." She goes, "Gilbert then." I go, "That sounds worse." Bit I thought, 'geel-ber-toh' is going to sound weird, so I said, "Gilbert." And that was it. From then on, it was Gilbert.
 
(To Natalia): Do you speak Spanish?
Natalia: Two words. It's terrible. I don't know Spanish.
 
(To Carol): What about you, did you grow up speaking Colombian Spanish in the house?
Carol: Yes, with my mom. My dad was really good with languages so he learned Spanish quickly. My mother had to learn English, so we spoke both in the house. But usually English with my dad, Spanish with my mom. I really wanted Natalia to learn Spanish, but my Spanish is not that great. I thought, "If she's learning it from me, it's going to sound weird." I was hoping that my mom and his mom would talk to her in Spanish more.
 
(To Natalia): Do you have plans for a comic book coming up?
Natalia: I have some ideas like my short films and my comics -- It could be either one. It’s like, “Well, maybe this would be easier if I just drew it" [chuckles]
 
Are you writing narratives?
Natalia: Just goofy stories. I wanted to draw a real story, but at the same time I just get excited, then I get kind of bored. I just rather do just a goofy story. I just prefer to do that.

​Was this how you felt in the beginning?
Gilbert: I’ve always wanted to make a story. It's never enough just to do a good drawing, even though I like doing it. My art gravitated more to storytelling than illustration. I’m not much of an illustrator at all.
 
Can we talk about your character Guadalupe? Guadalupe was my favorite when she was little and then she grows up and becomes a little snarky. How did that happen? Over the years I think she mellowed out again.
Gilbert: Sometimes I wonder about those decisions myself. There was that period when she had a real mean streak, an angry streak, but it was out of frustration - not mine, hers, as a character. I didn't want her to follow the simple path. She is the character that everybody likes as a kid. I wanted to give her a life, like a real person who changes. There's a kid you might now in school and they're your best friend and then you see them as a teenager and they're rotten. "This can't be the same person." Then you see them as an adult again and they're nice.
It's tricky with a character that people like, but I really wanted her to have that. I brought her back because her daughter is featured in the stories. I will emphasize her more as a nicer person. She has even mentioned this in one of the stories. She knew. She saw herself and was like, "I was going in this bad direction."
 
Was her bad streak a reaction to Luba's abuse [Luba is Guadalupe's mother]?
Gilbert: That was really tough. There's a point in your life when you see abuse and you realize, "Wait a minute." You become an adult you go, "Hey, that was a bunch of bullshit." It comes out in people in different ways. That was Guadalupe's thing. Luba alienated Maricela [Guadalupe's older sister]. Maricela went away. Guadalupe accepted Luba being abusive but she didn't accept Maricela being pushed away. She didn't accept it and that's what made her mad at that time.

​I saw that you included a note that "Fritz Haters will just have to be patient" in one of her stories. What was that about?
Gilbert: Some fans don't care for her storyline. They don't care for who she is, that storyline. You know what, actually, Jaime was envious because he doesn't get a lot of negative response to his characters. It doesn't mean that he wants to have a bad character. He just wants people to have different feelings about his work. Different feelings, like "This character I don't like".

​(To Carol): Do you give Gilbert some feedback?
Carol: Actually, I'm kind of behind right now. I started a rule when the comic started that I wouldn't read it until it was done. It's funny because of the way he works, he'll do a panel here, and then he'll do a panel there, like five pages later.
Gilbert: Yes, I switch pages around.
Carol: And then it all works together and you're like, "How do you do that?" [laughs] So I like to wait, and once the magazine or book is out, I'll go through it.
 
In the last story of the original Love and Rockets series Jaime's character Izzy visits Palomar. Is that an actual crossover?
Gilbert: Yes, we wanted to have the ultimate crossover as in they exist in the same world. Because Jaime and I played with that earlier but we never really made a definite play on that, so I asked him, "What do you think of Izzy ending the Palomar story?" and he's like, "It’s okay. Do you want me to draw it?" So we actually pasted her on.
 
Are you ever going to follow up on that?
Gilbert: Maybe, because I've been doing Palomar stories again, past stories that I didn’t tell before.
 
Is it weird to talk about comics you drew so many years ago?
Gilbert: I'm pleased that people are reading my books now. They're young, they weren’t born yet and they'll go, "Oh, I just read your book Heartbreak Soup or Human Diastrophism and I really liked it" so that makes me happy because they're looking at something I drew a long time ago, but it still connects with people. It doesn't get out of favor, I guess.